The exemplary embodiment relates to extraction of information from documents being processed and finds particular application in connection with a system and method for categorizing print jobs and inferring the motivation for printing them. This enables modifications to business processes to reduce paper usage.
In many contexts, such as the service industry, work is generally organized into processes that often entail printing documents. There is a growing trend towards replacing printing paper documents with digital counterparts, which may entail use of electronic signatures, email (instead of post mail) and online form filling. There are many reasons for this change, including higher productivity, cost-efficiency, and becoming more environmentally-friendly. Many large organizations are therefore looking for solutions to reduce paper usage and to move from using paper to digital documents. Unfortunately, especially in large organizations, it is often difficult to achieve this goal, because of a lack of information. Those in management, for example, often do not have a detailed understanding of where paper is being used by company employees, in particular, in which tasks or subtasks paper documents are generated, as well as how much paper is used in the process, in terms of the volume of paper being used in each of these tasks. Nor is there a good understanding of the reasons why paper is used for these tasks, i.e., what are the barriers that prevent using digital versions instead of paper documents within these tasks.
Having answers to these questions would help organizations to select which processes/tasks could be modified to facilitate moving them from paper to digital. However, without a good understanding of the paper consumption of the various tasks, and the reasons for printing documents, it is difficult to focus these efforts on the processes where changes would be the most effective.
The reasons for printing documents are often task dependent. Some common reasons involve requiring signatures, archiving, transitions between different computer systems, crossing organizational barriers, and so forth. However, there may be other reasons that have not been identified by the organization. To move from paper to digital, appropriate solutions may need to be implemented to replace the functions previously provided through generating paper documents, such as digital archiving, digital signatures, and the like. However, for some tasks, paper may afford benefits that digital documents do not provide. Paper is, for example, easy portable (e.g., when traveling), easy to read and annotate, and easy to hand over to another person. Employees could be provided with portable devices, such as eReaders, to address some of these issues, but this solution may not be cost-effective.
Currently, the transition from paper to digital is mainly achieved based on either ethnographic studies or consultancy: in these approaches typically an expert is sent to the site of the organization in order to study the existing work processes and to analyze these processes and the related tasks and constraints. In one study, management assumed that the paper consumption in the office was excessive and not really required for the work carried out by the employees. The extensive study carried out by ethnographers on site tended to disprove the assumption, but was time consuming to implement. See, Jacki O'Neill, David Martin, Tommaso Colombino, Antonietta Grasso, “A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing?”, CHI 2011—Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems—Vancouver BC, Canada, May 2011.
There remains a need for a system and method for associating different tasks within an organization with corresponding paper usages and usage rationales, so that candidate solutions can be evaluated and implemented efficiently.